Dreams de akira kurosawa biography

1990 film by Akira Kurosawa

Dreams (Japanese: 夢, Hepburn: Yume), also known as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, is a 1990 magical realistanthology film of eight vignettes written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. Inspired by actual recurring dreams that Kurosawa had, it stars Akira Terao, Martin Scorsese, Chishū Ryū, Mieko Harada and Mitsuko Baisho. It was the director's first film in 45 years in which he was the sole author of the screenplay. An international co-production of Japan and the United States, Dreams was made five years after Ran, with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and funded by Warner Bros. The film was screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, and has consistently received positive reviews.

Dreams addresses themes such as childhood, spirituality, art, death, and mistakes and transgressions made by humans against nature.

Plot

The film does not have a single narrative, but is episodic in nature, following the adventures of a "surrogate Kurosawa" through eight different segments, or "dreams", each one titled.

"Sunshine Through the Rain"

A young boy's mother tells him to stay at home during a day when the sun is shining through the rain, warning him that kitsune (foxes) have their weddings during such weather, and do not like to be seen. He defies her wishes, wandering into a forest where he witnesses the slow wedding procession of the kitsune. He is spotted by them and runs home. His mother meets him at the front door, barring the way, and says that an angry fox had come by the house, leaving behind a tantō knife. The mother gives the knife to the boy and tells him that he must go and beg forgiveness from the foxes, refusing to let him return home unless he does so. She warns that if he does not secure their forgiveness, he must take his own life. Taking the knife, the boy sets off into the mountains, towards the place under the rainbow where

Like the magic lantern that evokes childhood’s fascination with moving images in the films of Ingmar Bergman, the whole of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams seems to take us back to the medium’s infancy, to its primal pleasures and terrors. It is a film in which the shot, the sequence, and every element of cinematic storytelling feel newly invented. Yet this feature, composed of eight episodes, each a dream of Kurosawa’s, is also the testament of a venerable artist at his peak, one with much still to say but with nothing left to prove. Made after the director regained the world’s attention with his arthouse smashes of the 1980s, Kagemusha and Ran, and before his smaller, more meditative final two films, Rhapsody in August and Madadayo, the 1990 release has so many formal fascinations that it’s tempting to focus solely on them. Yet that would shortchange the emotional richness of his work, which is considerable: More than any other Kurosawa film—except perhaps Ikiru—Dreams might be regarded as an interior self-portrait, abounding in personal associations that are at once psychological, artistic, and philosophical.

For example, “Sunshine Through the Rain,” the first of the film’s eight dream episodes opens with a boy emerging from a house whose portal bears the family name: Kurosawa. So the child—identified as “I,” and who appears in five subsequent episodes—is the artist, but not, as the story reveals him, in a strictly literal or realistic sense. Forewarned that foxes perform their wedding ceremonies on days when sun and rain mix, the boy ventures into the woods and witnesses a decidedly unrealistic processional, an elaborately choreographed nature-dance with humans playing the foxes. Here, the autobiographical merges into the fantastical, the personal reaches out to embrace folklore and tradition.

And here, too, something else happens: The basic cinematic unit of subject (the person who looks) and predicate (what he sees) is set up in a way that equates

Japanese film director (1910–1998)

"Kurosawa" redirects here. For other uses, see Kurosawa (disambiguation).

The native form of this personal name is Kurosawa Akira. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 or 黒沢 明, Kurosawa Akira, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker who created 30 films of his own as well as occasionally directing and writing for others in a career spanning seven decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa displayed a bold, dynamic style strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it. He was involved with all aspects of film production.

Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action filmSanshiro Sugata (1943). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast the then little-known actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another fifteen films.

Rashomon (1950), which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golde

DREAMS (1990)

Surprisingly, it took a little bit of doing following the triumphant success of Ran for Kurosawa to secure financing for his next film, the much smaller Dreams. Then again, Kurosawa’s ambitions were for a pure art film which jettisoned plot and obvious spectacle for something more personal. Perhaps too personal, as a film based around one’s own dreams may not interest anybody else. But Kurosawa had faith in the project, which was reduced from ten segments to a more manageable eight segments, and enough clout to call in a few favors from his admirers. Steven Spielberg stepped in and convinced Warner Bros. to pick up the international rights to Kurosawa’s next film ensuring that the financing was in place. And George Lucas’ company Industrial Light and Magic was on hand to supply the needed special effects, ensuring that it would be a state of the art project. Although Kurosawa never made the jump to Hollywood, his influence was widespread and in his twilight years as a filmmaker he found plenty of love from Hollywood whereas Orson Welles did not

Like Ran, Kurosawa spent a lot of time painting key images of Dreams. More than any other film, those images would become the film rather than the editing or performances. To help him along, Kurosawa brought on board his old friend Ishiro Honda as a “creative consultant”, although co-director seems more accurate considering there’s evidence of Honda’s style and experiences in the final film. And, for the first time in decades, Kurosawa wrote the film entirely himself perhaps due to the personal nature of the film.

Kurosawa begins the film with plain titles, saving his visual flourishes for the actual dreams of the title, and a bit of text saying “I once had a dream”. The “I” in the text is very unusual for Kurosawa as he tended to avoid using film as autobiography unlike Fellini, except for perhaps Scandal. It’s not that Kurosawa’s films are devoid of pe